The present invention generally relates to coordinating the use of unrelated radio receivers and, more particularly, to coordinating the use of unrelated radio receivers that receive radio signals from multiple different transmitters.
Radio receivers, such as software defined radios (SDRs) are radio communication systems in which components that have been typically implemented in hardware (e.g. mixers, filters, amplifiers, modulators/demodulators, detectors, etc.) are instead implemented by software on a personal computer or embedded system. A basic SDR system may include a computer device (e.g., a personal computer, miniature computer, mobile device, etc.) equipped with a sound card, or other analog-to-digital converter, preceded by some form of radio frequency (RF) front end. In an SDR system, significant amounts of signal processing are handed over to the general-purpose processor, rather than being done in special-purpose hardware (electronic circuits). Such a design produces a radio which can receive and transmit widely different radio protocols or frequencies (sometimes referred to as waveforms) based solely on the software used.
SDR receivers are used in applications in which a wide variety of changing radio protocols and frequencies are required in real time. SDR receivers are often individually owned and operated, and thus, coordinating the use of multiple different SDR receivers for various applications is complex, if at all possible.